Why Multimedia Content is Important to Your Marketing Efforts

Why Multimedia Content is Important to Your Marketing Efforts

Moving into 2017 Multimedia content is only going to grow in popularity as a way for brands to engage their target market. What should you be paying attention to?

Multimedia content is going to become increasingly more important as we move into 2017 and beyond. Multimedia content is a term used to describe any combination of content styles. It could describe an infographic that combines illustrations with text, a video that uses animations with audio, or even a blog post that leverages text with static images.Whatever the combination, multimedia content is growing in popularity and is a great way for brands to engage their target market.

If you’re thinking about integrating multimedia content into your marketing, here are a few things to consider.

Don’t Create Content for the Sake of Creating Content

First and foremost, you should never create content for the sake of creating content. There needs to be a strategic purpose and exectuation plan carefully laid out before you ever start. This is especially true for multimedia content, that is inherently more time consuming to produce than a standard piece of text-base content. Three questions to answer before creating multimedia content include:

What action am I trying to entice? Every piece of content has a purpose. Understanding what your audience’s next step is after viewing the content is a critical question to answer. If you’re trying to increase your email list, then you might want to gate the piece of content behind an information wall that requires the person to give you their email before viewing. If you want to increase sales, you might want to include CTAs on the page or in the content itself. Whatever action you want a user to take should play a part in the piece of content.

Where am I publishing the piece? This is a much bigger question than most people consider. You shouldn’t just assume that the content will perform best on your website. In fact, some of the most successful multimedia pieces are published off-site. Consider working with another expert in your industry to produce a co-branded piece of content that is published on their website. This is especially useful if they have a larger audience base or a peripheral market.

How do you plan to promote it? The idea that if you create it, the audience will come is anything but true. The best way to drive attention to your multimedia content is through a strategic outreach and promotion plan. Use tools like Ahrefs and Buzzsumo to find websites and influencers that have shared previous content on your topic. Reach out to these sites and influencers to help drive more links and visitors. Also, make sure you leverage your owned and paid promotion channels to increase awareness for your piece.

Go Beyond Text

We’re creatures of habit, and that is especially true while at work. It’s easy to continue the habit of producing blog articles week after week. After all, it takes much less time, money, and energy to create a text-based blog article than a video or infographic.

While you might be seeing positive results from your articles, think about what kind of engagement an e-book, SlideShare, or other multimedia content might generate. Even something as simple as adding images to your text posts can improve results, with 40% of people reporting they respond better to an image than 1,000 words.

Don’t become a content zombie, break the routine of text-based content and try a piece of multimedia content.

Not all of your customers receive and retain information the same way. Some prefer text-based content; others are auditory or visual learners. The best idea is to cover your basis by producing content that touches on multiple levels. Multimedia content can help you do that.

Outside of their learning preferences, you should also create content that matches the social platform where your audience is most active. This strategy will help the promotion efforts and engagement of your multimedia content. If your audience spends most of its time on YouTube, you’ll want to create a video.

If your audience is active on Instagram or Pinterest, you should create image-heavy content. Considering the type of content that performs best on the social platform where your audience spends most of its time will help you understand the type of multimedia content that they want to consume.

Match Your Branding

Another important step to consider when producing multimedia content is how it interacts with your brand. At the highest level, this includes the colors and images that you use. Color plays a critical part in branding, and the same is true for your multimedia content. Pick colors that align with your brand identity and that can also trigger the emotions you’re looking to achieve with that piece of content.

At a deeper level, the multimedia content should carry a matching voice to your brand messaging. This singular identity should be uniform across your multimedia content, blog, sales copy, social posts, and other marketing collateral. The safest way to ensure content follows your brand’s identity is to create a style guide that outlines all the critical elements of your messaging. This guide will create strict parameters to keep your voice consistent.

Not as Hard as You Think

Many people don’t produce multimedia content because they think it will take too many resources. However, that is not always the case. In fact, there are a few tricks you can use to cut down the time and other resources required to producing quality rich-media content.

Reuse Ideas: Coming up with a compelling topic to create a piece of content around is arguably the most difficult step in the process. However, you don’t need to create an entirely unique idea for your multimedia content to succeed. In fact, you might see better results by using a topic that has performed well in the past, on your site or on another. Look through the analytics on your site to see which topics have historically generated the most traffic, links, engagement. If you don’t see anything noteworthy, then look for topics that your competitors or other industry experts have done that were successful. Use these older pieces as a building blocks to build the idea for your multimedia piece of content.

Recycle the Multimedia Content: Similarly to above, you don’t need to make content production harder than it already is. If you invest into producing an infographic, e-book, or other rich-media piece of content, then recycle that piece into other forms of content. For instance, you can take an infographic and slice up sections of that piece and turn it into a slideshare or video. By recycling the same piece of content into different forms of multimedia, you can extend the ROI.

Use Your Resources Effectively: When it comes to actually creating the multimedia piece, you have a lot of options. You can outsource the creative production to an agency like Pixel Productions. There are hundreds of content creation companies that you can use to execute the production. If you’d rather produce it internally, you can still create a quality piece of rich-media without hiring a developer, photographer, or designer. For instance, online tools like Canva, Vizualize, Venngage, and many others can help beginners create stunning illustrations, imagery, and infographics like the one below.